Modernly, devices transmitting multi-media (audio, video, images, viewable data, etc.) have come into common and widespread usage. Additionally, wireless data transmission methods and devices have come into widespread usage for transmitting a wide array of data types. More recently, such wireless technologies have come into use with video and other multi-media data.
In the current art, some applications of multi-media data to the wireless space have been employed with mixed success. One particularly attractive area of wireless data transmission concerns that of video data within networks. In particular, it is attractive to be able to wirelessly transmit video and other multi-media data between many different devices comprising a multi-media device network.
One of the problems facing such wireless communication of multi-media data is that posed by conditions of changing bandwidth between wireless devices. In particular, existing modes of wireless video communication do not have effective modes for adapting to conditions of changing wireless bandwidth. Such reduced bandwidth can arise due to conditions of interference and other conditions. One common occurrence can be a person walking between a wireless source device and its associated sink device. A lowered bit rate or reduced bandwidth is commonly observed under these or other conditions. In some wireless systems, quality of service policies can be used to implement measures that can adapt to changes in network transmission quality and service availability.
However, such approaches are not readily adaptable to use for multi-media devices such as video devices. These devices, as they currently exist, do not enable quality of service adjustments to be made in data transmission. This problem is particularly acute when encountered in video devices, and particularly high definition video devices that require a great deal of bandwidth to accommodate the large amounts of data used to render high definition images. Because quality of service information is not generally transmitted between multimedia devices, it cannot be used to adjust video (or other multi-media) qualities and properties to maintain a desired level of fidelity in the signal as rendered by associated sink devices.
What is needed are methods and devices suitable for monitoring quality of service information concerning multimedia data signals and in some cases adapting the network devices to accommodate changing network conditions.
Thus, it is desirable to create a data transport system suitable for transmitting multimedia data in a wireless environment.